What's Up with Tech?

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com What if your marketing stack could think with you and act for you? We sit down with Christian Monberg Chief Technology Officer & Head of Product from Zeta to unpack Athena, a super intelligent agent designed not as a chat add-on but as the operating system for modern marketing. Built on a consolidated data fabric and a supergraph g...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Hype is loud, but outcomes win. We sit down with Smartling CEO Bryan Murphy to explore why the center of gravity in AI is shifting from raw models to the application layer where workflows, data, and governance translate into real business value. If you’ve been stuck in pilot purgatory, you’ll hear how to move from experiments to produc...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Your most powerful product might also be your biggest liability: an AI agent making decisions you can’t see and answers you can’t predict. We sat down with Andre Scott of Coralogix to unpack how to make black-box systems measurable, accountable, and—most importantly—improvable over time. We trace the journey from monoliths to microserv...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Telecom doesn’t need another AI science project; it needs outcomes. That’s the thread running through our conversation with kishore bobbarjung from Tupl, where explainable, agentic automation is delivering real wins: faster resolution of customer issues at a US tier one and double-digit energy savings across more than ten European netw...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Tired of chatbots that stall when customers need real help? We dive into how agentic AI flips the script by taking actions inside your systems—issuing refunds within limits, updating orders, authenticating users, and escalating with intent—while humans handle complex, high-empathy moments. Joe Anderson, Senior Director and Head of CX a...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Trust has become the entry ticket to the internet, and users are now choosing safety over price and speed. We sit down with Raj from Trua to dig into the 2025 Trust Survey and why verification has shifted from a nice-to-have to a must-have. From shocking stats on consumer expectations to the real reasons fear and fatigue are rewriting...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com What if the most human-feeling teammates on your projects moved at machine speed and collaborated across every vendor you use? We sit down with Vijoy Pandey is GM and Senior Vice President of Outshift to unpack how agentic AI and quantum networking move from shiny demos to dependable, scaled systems that actually ship results. We start...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Cameras don’t just record anymore—they inform, alert, and help teams act before problems get expensive. We sit down with Jeff Corrall Chief Product Officer at March Networks, to unpack how AI-powered video is evolving from security footage to real operational intelligence you can search, measure, and scale without ripping out legacy sy...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com What if your network could understand intent, adapt in real time, and deliver the exact experience you need—whether you’re at a packed concert, inside an ambulance, or running a factory floor? We dive into the shift from manual engineering to autonomous networks and how open standards are making AI practical, measurable, and global. Cl...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com What happens when thousands of retired Ethereum GPUs meet a tidal wave of AI demand? We sit down with Hidde Hoogland Founder at Decent to unpack how a former mining operation evolved into a decentralized edge provider and why connecting to Aethir’s GPU marketplace changed the math on utilization, cash flow, and scale. It’s a candid loo...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Customers don’t call to chat with a bot—they want outcomes. In my chat with Jim Palmer Dialpad's Chief AI Officer we dive into how Dialpad’s AI-first platform turns real-time voice, video, and digital interactions into agentic workflows that act on behalf of users, learn from every result, and hand off seamlessly to humans when it...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Most brands pay again and again to win back customers they already won. We wanted to fix that. In this candid conversation with Sandeep Menon Co-Founder Auxia we unpack how an agentic AI platform can sit on top of rich first-party data and finally make it work: autonomous decisions about timing, creative, channel, and offer that meet p...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com AI is moving faster than any wave we’ve seen—and the hidden cost is complexity. We sit down with New Relic’s leadership to unpack how observability must evolve to keep up with agents, vibe coding, and probabilistic systems that don’t fail like traditional software. From the early SaaS days to hyperscale cloud and now AI-native architec...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com What if your contact center could speak 46 languages, automate millions of calls, and still hand tricky moments to the right human in seconds? We dig into the launch of Teneo 8 with CEO Per Ottosson and reveal how a hybrid AI approach—combining LLM-powered conversation with deterministic logic—delivers scale, governance, and measurable...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Tired of chasing downloads that never turn into deals? We sat down with Refine Labs’ CEO Megan Bowen to unpack why so many B2B playbooks still assume the seller holds the power—and how to rebuild your go-to-market around the way buyers actually make decisions today. From redefining MQLs to recognizing meaningful intent, this conversati...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com We’re joined by **Anand Eswaran**, CEO of **Veeam Software**, and **Rehan Jalil**, CEO of **Securiti AI**, following Veeam’s bold acquisition of Securiti—a move that fuses data protection, security, and AI governance into one platform. Together, they unpack why GPUs alone can’t fix untrusted data and why 80–90% of enterprise AI project...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com What if your next high-performing hire never sleeps, knows your stack, and ships secure environments in hours? We dive deep with Chris Chapman CTO of MacStadium to map the shift from brittle automation to agentic AI running on fleets of Macs, where outcomes replace step-by-step scripts and digital employees take on repeatable, high-val...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com What if your crypto wallet felt as safe as your bank account? We sit down with Crypto Insurer BDIC Insurance Founder and CEO Jeffrey Glusman to unpack a bold plan to bring deposit insurance to digital assets and unlock mainstream confidence. Instead of chasing whales, the model targets the everyday holder with clear, affordable coverag...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Most AI pilots impress in a demo and stall in production. We wanted to unpack why. Joseph Kim is the President and CEO of Druid AI joins us to break down the real blockers to AI readiness and the playbook that moves teams from wow to working systems. We talk candidly about market hype, sobering stats on failed deployments, and the ingr...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com What happens when agents can talk to agents—securely, asynchronously, and at scale? We sit down with Edward Funnekotter Chief Architect and AI Officer from Solace to unpack the architecture behind an open agent mesh and why event-driven design is the key to turning AI hype into dependable workflows. Instead of a single chatbot, imagine...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com The fastest way to lose a security battle is to wait for it to start. We pull back the curtain on a proactive strategy to break the attack chain—disrupting reconnaissance, lateral movement, and exfiltration—by uniting offensive testing with integrated blue team defenses that actually prove what works. John Grancarich Chief Strategy Off...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Noise is the enemy of good defense. We sit down with Jawahar Sivasankaran President of Cyware to unpack how a threat-centered architecture, powered by agentic AI and rich collaboration, can turn scattered data into clear, prioritized action. Rather than adding yet another dashboard, the strategy puts high-fidelity intelligence at the c...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Want proof that better IT experience can be engineered, not wished into existence? From the floor at Gartner, we sit down with Lakeside to explore how a lightweight, 29‑year-old agent design built for scarcity is suddenly perfect for today’s edge. When compute, memory, and network were expensive, the team designed a platform that sips...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com The lock icon is not a comfort blanket. It’s a contract. We sit down with Chris Hickman, Chief Security Officer at Keyfactor, to unpack what digital trust really means when every person, device, app, and service needs a verifiable identity. From the browser to the factory floor, PKI and certificate management quietly power secure conne...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Patch Tuesday shouldn’t feel like roulette. We sat down at Gartner Symposium with Egan from NinjaOne to explore a simple, disciplined idea: beat IT misery with speed, clarity, and trustworthy automation. Guided by decades in the DoD and intelligence community, Egan frames endpoint management as an operational craft where time-to-value,...